Friction and Fraction: Cultural Exigency and Struggle for Cultural identity in Bharati mukherjee’s The Tiger’s Daughter.

Abstract

The present paper quite effectively maps out the fundamental problems of women who with their diasporic consciousness, try to come out from the inevitable and unavoidable clutch of cultural exigency and psychological trauma, triggered by transmutation of mind and the nostalgic entanglement of native culture. In The Tiger’s Daughter, Bharati Mukherjee endeavours to explore the cultural dilemma between America and India incorporating the sense of isolation, rootlessness and violence which the immigrant women experience with their bitter sensibility in course of their psychological and academic journey. The novel, through the central character of Tara, examines the inevitability of proper communication that helps one to achieve the solidarity of identity and cultural uniformity. In The Tiger’s Daughter, the author creates an unfixed cultural ground for Tara, on the basis of which she can’t go further to stabilize her emotional dilemma and cultural identity. Being a ‘nowhere person’, Tara, the protagonist of the novel, foreshadows the cultural crux of all migrant women who are always set forth by the contemporary diasporic writers in the eternal vortex of struggle for cultural solidarity in the strand of modern globalisation. This paper aims to portray Bharati Mukherjee’s innate struggle to display cultural oscillation between two different cultures (America and India), psychological dilemma and fraction of emotional ground of the migrant women through the character of Tara who tries hard to fix-up herself with a certain cultural association in course of her adaptability of new culture.